Contentions

“Some people imagine there is a building somewhere with a secret door they can open and find a group of scantily clad women enriching uranium.”

And with that unspeakably hilarious excuse, our chief North Korea negotiator, Christopher Hill of the State Department, has quipped America into submission. Today’s Wall Street Journal carries a piece by John Bolton about Mr. Hill and the startling failure of the American effort to disarm North Korea. Bolton writes:

According to numerous press reports and Mr. Hill’s April 10 congressional briefing, the U.S. will be expected to accept on faith, literally, North Korean assertions that it has not engaged in significant uranium enrichment, and that it has not proliferated nuclear technology or materials to countries like Syria and Iran.

Indeed, the North will not even make the declaration it earlier agreed to, but merely “acknowledge” that we are concerned about reports of such activities – which the United States itself will actually list. By some accounts, the North Korean statement will not even be public. In exchange for this utter nonperformance, the North will be rewarded with political “compensation” (its word): Concurrent with its “declaration,” it will be removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and freed from the Trading With the Enemy Act.

Axis, schmaxis. As Bolton points out, the worst is yet to come. North Korea has been compensated for refusing to comply with the least intrusive of inspections. If Iran’s mullahs had ever considered being transparent about their own enrichment, they’re laughing about it now. The question of America’s role as the world’s police department is a debatable one. But if we’re going to be the donut-chomping, overtime-collecting cop who was grandfathered into the force under outdated qualifications, who’s going to object? Only the nations we’ve pledged to protect, I suppose